You must have a Hauppauge HD-PVR which has been previously
loaded with firmware by installing and testing it in a Windows machine.
Go no further until you do this!

You must have at least a dual core CPU with enough power to
handle H.264 decoding. My test platform shows 65% CPU usage
during playback (that's more than one whole core). OR you must have an nVidia video card which is supported by VDPAU.

You must have a working KnoppMyth R5.5 installation on the
machine
you plan on using. Make sure everything works as expected before
proceeding. Make a backup of this configuration.

You must have tolerance for beta type software and
the various bugs and broken things which will
occur.

Words of
Caution:

Read the requirements above! If you
don't meet the requirements, don't expect it to work. This is
crazy beta stuff, so no warranties. Don't complain about loss
of data, broken features/drivers/software, headaches, etc...

What is working?

All the basics work
including: LiveTV, recordings, commercial flagging and skipping.

What does not work?

Currently, you can't playback
HD-PVR recorded interlaced
content (480i or 1080i) without the frontend crashing. This is a known
problem and the developers are working on it. Currently, I have my
DirecTV box set to output only
720p. My HDHomeRun continues to work fine with any
resolution and will deinterlace just fine.

Lossless
transcoding of HD-PVR recordings does not work. This is
something that mythtranscode will need added support for in the future.
The is currently a work-around script which requires compiling
the latest ffmpeg and AVIDemux (see the wiki page for details).

I don't have mythstream working. I have not tired to get it working
since I don't use it.

The weather stuff seems a little broken. MythVideo works, but is in flux.

There is probably more broken stuff, so let me know what you find.

Prepare Your
System:

Since you currently have a working and happy KnoppMyth R5.5
installation, you will need to verify a few things before backing up
your working baseline configuration.

Make sure you are using a supported theme and OSD. If not, you will
need to switch before
updating. Here is the link to the stock themes currently in
SVN:

Also, make sure you backup the custom KnoppMyth menus. You
will want to copy these back once you have everything working.

mkdir ~/menuscp
/usr/share/mythtv/*.xml ~/menus

Install
Required Packages

To install/build/use the latest MythTV, you will need to install Qt4.
To build the HD-PVR driver, you will also need the mercurial
source code control tool. So, do the following to become root
and use apt-get:

You still need to remove some extra stuff by hand; mainly any left over
themes and (for some reason unknown to me) smolt. It may be a
good idea to totally wipe out /usr/share/mythtv, but I have not tried
that yet.

You
should now see a /dev/videoX device. This should be
/dev/video0
if you have no other capture cards in the chassis (which I strongly
recommend). If you do not see this device reported, then
reference the MythTV
HD-PVR wiki page for more info. You can make a test
capture, but it will only playback on your Windows machine right now.

Once the driver is working, you will want to add it to your /etc/modules file so it loads on boot.

cp /etc/modules /etc/modules.bakecho hdpvr >> /etc/modules

The Quick Way
(built on a Core2Duo processor)

The
quick way is to download and install my prebuilt packages.
These will probably not be the latest SVN version, but you
can
always build from source and install your own packages later.

Assuming everything goes well, you are ready to fire up MythTV again.
You can either reboot or do the following:

/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend
start
killall xinit

Make
sure you check your log files located at /var/log/mythtv/ to make sure
everything is OK. Also play with the frontend now and go
through
all the settings to make sure your theme and OSD are correct.
The
theme rendering has glitches after building the cache and you may need to restart the
frontend to get a clean display. Once you are satisfied,
proceed
to adding the HD-PVR tuner.

Build MythTV
from SVN (by script)I
have written a script to which will get/update the code, configure,
make and build/install the packages. This is what I'm currently
using to make my builds. You should run this script as root.